things move around

Say you’ll meet me down on the beach tonight, where you and I can dance the night away underneath the stars and soft guitars: it’s going to be an all night party, babe.

Drifters.

I walk out in the city and see -
what?
Fuck all;
nose concertinaed against a wall - what?
Come concupiscent; cut ones pearls,
annunciate ones world.

A mangled mass of too-close too-brief encounters,
horns and the horn,
nights in gunmetal and nights gonmental,
garrulous old chess players and their devilish descendants,
downtown core,
stubble and sweat burning,
calamitous call of car to car across all cars,
those sensual gelatos and those suddenly sensual strutting gigolos,
foetid stink of flesh and the taste of trash in the mouth as you pass the unemptied dumpsters,
and toil,
and Sunday and the fall of the cadence,
the coils of cable in the basements,
the city’s groin:

vagrants and vacancies;
thump of a tomcat landing
from a balcony;
and sleep;
sleep.

Melanie?

When the summer evenings are warmest we take deckchairs out onto the sidewalk and drink and watch the lobelias wilt from the hanging baskets. Ah, the sun.

I love an obsession.

This morning the bus pulls in to the stop just past the entrance to the country club, temporarily preventing a charcoal-suited patron from driving his Merc out onto the public highway, deferring for a few seconds a breakfast meeting or a business-class check-in.

A small victory in the never-ending cl@ss w@r.

Assistant Treasurer:

Treasury Assistant:

NOT to be confused with the Treasury Assistant.

I have not met Yvette, yet;
Yvette I’ve not yet met.
If I don’t introduce myself, I bet
Yvette’ll let me sweat.

But I have met Dan and Anne
and Anna, Dana, and Aman
and a man called Caliban
who sits near Anne and Dan.

I mosied into town for my last lunch. My coworkers had assembled themselves in a corner of the pub such that the corner itself, at the epicentre of the remorse, was vacant. There I seated myself and allowed the lamenting to commence.

All around me, people fell to eating and chatting amongst each other. Some of my particularly close companions cast sympathetic glances my way in between mouthfuls of pub “fayre”. I swiftly decided upon a course of action involving large quantities of stout and minimal quantities of human interaction.

From the televsion, the NHL draft lottery occupied the attention of those present who still remembered the game “hockey”, which legend refers to as having been popular in these parts in times of yore. Of course, that was before “thlockout” - the Armageddon-like event from which these people date the first stirring of their nascent cultural development.

I finished my pint and ordered another, which arrived accompanied by a gleaming gold measure of Talisker. That I also drank, its peaty tendrils pressing into my nostrils like the gnarled fingers of a resurrected Pict.

And so another of each, and, via the liquor store, so home.